Framework for a Strengths-Based Society

The world as we know it is in disruption. Maybe it’s always been in disruption, pushing us through cycles of apparent chaos so that evolution can continue and new paradigms emerge. Thanks to social technologies, we’re growing into a globally connected communication system, and seem to be heading towards a tipping point. But what is it that we’re transitioning to?

Maybe we’ve forgotten the bigger picture. The Web was never intended to be about marketing, banner ads, and spam; it was intended to be about learning, sharing resources, and attaining a deeper level of understanding of each other and the world around us. The latter is happening, albeit slowly. I wonder if reframing the experience might help us accelerate the process.

I’ve been thinking about what that would look like, and what it is we’re really trying to achieve. I just read a piece on Edge by David Gelertner, titled ‘Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously.’ In it, he provides an overview of “where we’re at” with the Web – a world of information, activity streams, and NOW; flooded and drowned by immediacy:

The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all.

I think he grazed over an incredibly important idea, but never went further to develop it. Earlier in the piece, he said something that also hints at this “big idea”:

It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them.

So the information is only half the battle. Now we need people to filter and understand it.

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time on the web; reading, learning, watching. Only in the past six months have I decided to experiment with intentionally growing a personal learning network. I’ve written before about how I’ve been using Twitter for personal growth (How to Use Twitter to Build Intelligence), and now I’m focusing on how to build the social capital within my network through “network weaving” and what could probably be referred to as “targeted sharing.”

I’m becoming convinced that this is the purpose of the web: to use it as a tool to enhance both ourselves and the network.

I think the web, in it’s nowness, has tricked us into a constant state of reaction. The information is streaming all around us, and without a focused mindset of intentional purpose in place, we are not in control. Even as we’re posting (which we often confuse with ‘creating’), what we post is usually in reaction to something else, or worse, an echo of it. In our social networks, we’re weaving intricate representations of our identities, posting our interests, photos, and status updates – but these are not ‘creating’ either, but rather asserting. “THIS is who I am. THIS is what I’ve done.” None of these things are creating.

I think, as a society, we have lost ourselves.

The Internet didn’t cause the degradation – we’ve been slowly breaking down for decades – but the Web may be pushing us in the wrong direction because of how the experience is framed. Everything is about the information “out there,” how to search it, filter it, and tag it. But where does that leave US?

I’ve danced around this subject for months, not knowing quite how to bring it forward. But perhaps what’s needed is to be blunt. Before we can hope to advance forward as a species, I think we should turn the focus away from what exists out there, and instead turn inwards and look at ourselves.

I see the web as a tool for evolving our consciousness. Not just to be more present or mindful, or more empathetic, but to actually develop to be more fully human. We must understand the implications of our human agency, and learn to cultivate the forces inherent within us that enable us to impact the world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging, and folksonomies, and shared language, and found it interesting that in our obsessive desire to label literally every thing around us, we haven’t yet thought about how we define ourselves. (And I don’t count a Twitter bio of ‘social media expert’ as self-defintion).

I’m talking about really reflecting on our Strengths, the combination of things that make each of us both unique and united. There is currently no tool or app out there of which I’m aware that would allow us to describe ourselves and each other in a way that puts a focus on self-development and social capital amplification.

If we shifted the way we talked about ourselves, would there be a shift in our ability to grow? And further, would it help us to assemble dynamic teams and find the kinds of people we need in order to launch initiatives and take action?

As we become more interconnected and accessible, we need to be able to search for each other not only by topic of interest, but by the types of people with whom we’d like to collaborate. I imagine an index that would travel with us around the web, comprised of our strengths, our skills, and our social connections. As networks take precedence in the way we orient ourselves on the web, it will be useful to have visual maps of how we’re connected. Our personal skill sets, knowledge, and expertise will become our virtual resumes, constantly updated and vetted in real time. And our strengths are our underlying ‘human factors’ that act as the foundation for our personal operating systems. This might emerge as a visualization, or possibly as a series of tag clouds. Here’s a few examples of the types of words I think would be used in a “social tagging system.”

[Update: A tag cloud is just one example of what it could look like. It’s hard to put things that may boil down to ‘tacit knowledge’ into words. Another way this could go is via images, like archetypes or badges.]

I think we’ve suffered too long in fitting ourselves into roles and job descriptions instead of choosing to operate in accordance with our strengths. If we define ourselves by a job title, we attach ourselves to prestige, influence, and power. We compete for limited positions, and discard our true selves in place of fitting a mold.

But what happens now that we live in an era where our knowledge, creativity, and ingenuity are being acknowledged as the source of our wealth? What happens when we exchange value as a result of the limitless potential of our strengths? If we shifted the focus, we could each be allowed to develop and excel in the ways we’re naturally inclined to do. If we know what those strengths are and how to harness them, we’ll be able to use the Web more effectively as a tool for learning and for collaboration.

It will take a combination of self-awareness, self-assessment, and some soul-searching, but I think this is a key element in honing ourselves so we can benefit from our collective intelligence. I think it starts with developing a shared language of how we want to define ourselves, and which strengths and values we want to cultivate as we push society to the next level.

There is no longer a scarcity of information. We’re saturated by it. What we need to know now is how to combine the people together who will know how to use it.

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89 thoughts on “Framework for a Strengths-Based Society”

Such is the lure and danger of virtualized humanity. Can we be led into virtuality in a way that makes us more human? What design ethos and practices might wield the web as a tool to build better people? And what might this relationship, this merger between humans and machines look like in 20, 30, or 50 years? The web is so young and so shiny and we’re all rushing in to look at each other through new lenses. As you suggest, it’s rather important to consider how we’re changing the web in ways that change us…

i’m not sure what you mean by virtualized humanity. what i’m thinking is that we are out of touch with what we’re naturally good at. i don’t think the web is going to magically change that. but if we get back in touch with ourselves, thinking about what we really want, how we excel, maybe aided at first with self-assessments (like a myers-briggs, etc), we can start to understand the things that would make us really thrive in life. and i mean in terms of affecting things in the physical world. understanding that i enjoy researching, connecting dots, ideating, and scenario planning has encouraged me to pursue avenues that allow me to keep doing those things, and i’m happy to do it and passionate about it. i don’t have the stat in front of me now, but i read somewhere that like 12% of people are fulfilled by their jobs. is it that all jobs are so soul-deadening, or are we not doing work that allows us to utilize our greatest strengths? i think it would encourage more collaboration and innovation to be able to work on projects where everyone is valued for their strengths. there’s no shortage of them, we all have different ones, and they’re all valuable. i think it will be interesting when we have a better understanding of strengths so that we know how we can participate effectively in projects/value-creation. also, i think many strengths are like tacit knowledge, but highlighting inherent strength is not something we really do, but i think we should.

By moving parts of our lives online, into digital networks, we’ve stepped into a virtual social & cognitive space. Humanity, as a species, is increasingly virtualized in the digital domain: we represent ourselves through crafted interfaces & intermediary social profiles, icons & avatars; we speak through bytes and 140char bursts, passing urls and embeds. This is a new form of social transaction and, likely, brings with it all sorts of subtle & not-so-subtle behavioral conditionings and entrainments, eg the dopamine burst of getting a new Follower. Our greatest human construct – the webernets – is undoubtedly changing what it means to be human. Yet, we also bring our social humanity – the innate empathy and morality that makes us care for each other, often with altruistic disregard to our own gains – into this domain in ways that empower great acts of kindness & collaboration. I guess your post highlighted for me the tension between these two aspects of “virtualized humanity” and the call to empathic designers to engineer humanistic solutions and help entrain us towards a more successful integration with the virtual in ways that reinforce the physical world.

We are virtualized, HOWEVER… this is just a step in the pathway. Venessa is describing a way to not only add value to our real world network, our humanity and ultimately get in touch with our uniqueness. By making the network more interesting and reflective of our real life, our relationships can be that much more real by having interactions with likeminded folks. Through all of the tech connecting people, Meetup.com proves that we still cherish and grow from direct human interactions.

OK, I appreciate where you’re coming from, and have to confess that I’d fallen out of the more recent discussions because I felt they had lost grounding in the concrete community settings in which I work–and which represent what I believe to be the creative margins, the increasingly permeable boundaries or edges between the popularly perceived “online” world of social media, the Web, and the Internet overagainst the organic, living, breathing, upagainst-the-wall world in which most of the planet’s human children have their daily existence.
Underneath the radar of most marketing hype and the rapid, apparent commandeering of language and concepts by commercial interests, there has always been a network of folks patiently and persistently laboring to use every available technology to enliven the connections of an ever-emerging, ever-evolving social consciousness, worldwide.
For me, it began twenty years ago with the Freenet movement, including the Seattle Community Network (SCN), which I helped found in the footsteps of the Cleveland Freenet (having itself evolved from “St. Silicon’s Hospital and Information Dispensary”) and Big Sky Telegraph. I also include in this journey the Pueblo MOO project supported by staff from Xerox PARC, providing online connection through a highly creative online environment between elementary school students in an underserved community with elders in a remote senior citizens center and educators across the continent. People, given half a chance, come alive in both worlds, and in fact, the distinction as separate worlds dissolves into a spectrum of relationships.
The most exciting active integration of technologies enhanced by the Internet with near-real time immediacy in terms of social impact and networking (and yes, the development of a trans-global personal/community consciousness) has been the Ushahidi crisis mapping initiative, born out of Africa, but now flexibly and rapidly mobilizing people in multiple roles to serve communities in distress across the world, most recently in Haiti and Chile. Here is the emerging woof and warp of the new social fabric, renewed human connections, a growing global consciousness manifest at the “input” side of the keyboard.
Things tend to become very clean at the “frontiers,” priorities far more clear, refreshing in the fundamental complexity of life; not complexity as goal or business advantage but complexity as an unfolding reality of marvelously increasing complexity. Filtering becomes easier, friendships–old friends from long lost lifetimes and new friends never to be encountered face-to-face–more dear.
Knowledge, creativity, and ingenuity–and connection–have always been at the center of the human enterprise (thankfully well beyond the commercial sense).
Sorry, I’m not intending to grind any axes (although I’m sure it sounds like it). Just saying that you don’t have to step that far back from the computer terminal to uncover profound social needs and imaginings that transform one’s perceptions of the destiny of online media, in the service of the most fantastic chapter of the human journey.

that’s amazing that you’ve been a part of it ‘from the beginning,’ and have never lost touch with its potential. what about those that grew up only knowing the web as a cluttered place of distractions and spam, who have never been shown how to take advantage of it?

Alas, I wasn’t “there at the beginning.” I’m old, not that old. And I’m not talking about the potential of the Web–real, concrete, practical impacts of the Web upon an emerging social consciousness have been happening from the beginning and continue today. You know this; all your columns center on this. The disorientation, dislocation, unsettling loss of self occurs most intensely when one loses track of the boundaries, when one tries to resolve ultimate meanings from within the Web itself or through ever deeper introspection in the framework of the Web alone.
It’s always been about people, connections to people, and the impacts on living social structures.
‘Cause here’s the thing: strengths, like social capital, are network attributes momentarily assigned to individuals. You don’t know half of the real strengths you have at any given time until they’ve been summoned, called forth, challenged as it were by a pressing social need. And few strengths are lifelong, much less eternal (maybe there’s some meta strengths that are more protean than others–but only by constant stretching, redefinition, and challenging).
That’s the beauty of living in community–personal strengths change and grow, in content, intensity and social relevance. Yeah, sometimes tagging might be helpful, but at critical junctures, it’s the unexpected appearance of someone who didn’t realize they had the required strength that turns the tide. Otherwise you fall victim to the illusory quest for the ultimate efficiency and productivity–essentially extending and dramatizing resume material. “Wouldn’t a technological fix make it more efficient to…” Actually it’s more efficient to uncover strengths in yourself and others by encountering people in diverse, unexpected situations when folks have to do something they didn’t expect or prepare for. Then you see strengths. And you see genuine social change.
That’s what I mean by exploring the boundaries, the margins, the frontiers, the knife edges between online and in person.
Ok, my oldest son has grown up with the Web, and as a result, he has a tremendous and growing network of 100s of contacts all over the world (mostly folks he has met in person through studies, performance, master classes), and no matter where in the country he decides to audition for his masters studies in cello performance, he has someone he can stay with and great stories to share. And he’s never “off the ends of the earth” to his family as I was when I worked overseas. He discovered that all on his own–then he introduced me to FaceBook.
You discover the power of the Web from the perspective of the Not-Web, not from further refinements within the Web itself.
Honest to god, there’s gotta be a more concise way to talk about this stuff–thanks for your stimulating posts and forbearance. Finally there’s not that much to learn–and the really important stuff you relearn over and over again as if for the first time. The technical stuff comes and goes.

what i’m thinking is that we do refocus on ourselves, in the ‘real world,’ and identify who we are and how we’d really *want* to contribute. i don’t think life is really framed for us that way growing up, and we spend our adult lives unlearning what we were taught about our limitations and what we *should* be doing. (or maybe that’s just the story of my life).
THEN, with a better knowledge of ourselves, we can enter the online world with more intention, and know the attributes that we have and how they could be useful. i think it would be more interesting, when thinking about how we want to build our networks, to have access to some contextual information about each other, beyond just interests. and i do think that we do have strengths that are dominant ones….i know we’re always growing, but you have your people who are naturally meticulous, or those very future-focused, or those that are good at coordinating, or those good at persuading/influencing/capturing attention. i don’t know anyone who excels at every strength, and you wouldn’t want that. i think people are able to be passionate when they’re aligning their actions with those inherent strengths. what do you think? (you can start a new thread at bottom if you want to continue….)

A few years ago I read Marcus Buckingham’s bestselling book “Now, Discover Your Strengths”. I read the book, took the online questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and discovered my ‘top 5 inborn talents’. I was skeptical at first about being defined in terms of only 5 talents (chosen from a limited set of 34 talents), but the description of these talents looked surprisingly familiar to me. It was as if I saw my personal blueprint. I soon realized that many of my achievements were mainly due to these 5 talents.

Ever since I read the book, I try to capitalize on my talents instead of strengthening my inevitable shortcomings. It works like a charm. It implies, among other things, making conscious decisions in work and everyday life instead of fitting a mold. Life should fit me, not the other way around (and a certain degree of flexibility helps to enjoy life and its possibilities even more).

So yes, Venessa, I fully support your idea of focussing on our strengths, and making it easier to communicate them. I do believe that if we all focus on and share our strengths, the net outcome of collaborative efforts will be much higher than when each of us tries to be good at everything. Better to excel in one area than to be mediocre in many.

I wouldn’t know of any language suited to express our strengths, because this language would be inevitably flawed by the limited characteristics one can choose from. For the purpose of online (and offline) collaboration, though, I like your social tagging system as a starting point. Adding some key characteristics from the Gallup study and similar studies may further complete the picture.

Thanks again for your excellent post, Venessa.

I look forward to reading the complementary insights from your other readers.

good suggestion about about the gallup study. i actually did the assessment from Strengthsfinder2.0 a few years ago, and same thing – it gives you your top 5 strengths – and i can’t even tell you how clarifying it has been for me and gave me confidence to go in the direction that somewhere deep inside i knew i wanted to go. it’s what got me thinking about this strengths mapping idea. in the book, it gives examples about how if you’re a certain type of person, for instance conceptually based, you want to have critics and analytical people around, to help you refine and temper your ideas. (which is kind of what i do here) 🙂 i thought, how great would it be to know who the ‘activators’ are, or the ‘facilitators’, or the ‘critics’… so you can match people to projects not only on their personal background skills & expertise, but also on how different personalities would compliment each other. at the organizational level, i think this would be an interesting way to assemble teams. i’d imagine that the more it was used/refined, the more effective it would be.

well, i think just the way society & culture are changing, we are being given the opportunity to express our agency in new ways. the web gives us the opportunity, in theory, but i’ve said before that i think we need to not confuse assertion with agency. (just because you have the ability to publish a blog, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re impacting anything in the world. we have to go further than that.)

in this post-industrial era, we’re not being asked to be cogs anymore, doing our predetermined jobs & roles, but to be agents, making choices & decisions, collaborating, innovating. so yes, i think the changes are raising the bar as to what we expect from each other in business and in life.

Just because we have the ability to publish a blog, indeed does not mean we are impacting things for the greater good. However, having the liberty to express your honest thoughts is a powerful catalyst for empowering change. Not all of us can be change agents (that is why folks like you and @opensky are here), but we ALL have a small (and sometimes, big) role to play in elevating our expectations from business, and life.

We are a confused species. Most people are unwilling to look within and face the unknowns that lie inside us. Thus they look outward and reflect what they see back at the world and end up fitting in with it. Artists do the opposite. They accept their confusion and go past it to where they find the inspiration to create.

You mentioned what creativity is not, but then proceeded to say it is one of our greatest strengths, but what is creativity? I think trying to “harness” or create an app to encourage creativity is bound to fail. Creativity is an expression of something that you have never known before. You might know the medium or style you want to use to express it, but to tap the inspiration to create one must be in touch with the unknown and let it erupt out of you. It is an experience and yes it can be shared, and the tools for doing that are awesome. But sharing one’s creativity doesn’t lend itself to a sharing the process of creating. It’s always extremely personal.

Getting people in touch with their strengths is great. I probably wouldn’t have stumbled upon your writing, if I didn’t start looking for fellow futurists after using the Strengths Finder on myself. I’m very thankful for that. But no matter how much you know your strength, it isn’t the same as exploring the unknowable.

You said “as a society we have lost ourselves”. I would argue that ourselves have lost society and it’s because we let fear and comfort dictate what the future may hold for us, rather than standing up and saying “I’m confused, but I want to make things better anyway!” The trick is convincing society that it’s ok to be confused. If you are a leader of any type you will constantly be staring into the unknown and when you can’t find it anymore, you’ll be dead.

i used strengthsfinder too, was so useful to me. and yes, creativity comes from within, prodded forward with a mix of hard work + passion + luck. what i’m saying is that we should do a better job creating opportunities for people to do work that allows them to be creative and allows them to explore and tap their passions and potential. i think most people don’t get this opportunity, and it’s a robbery of one of the gifts of being human. what if we reframed the system to encourage these strengths?

We should do a better job! How should we do better?
If you have the basic necessities like food, water, and shelter, you have what you need to be human. Obviously we could do a lot better at these few things for many people, but I don’t think this is the robbery you’re talking about for most of the “western” world.

The biggest obstacle to people sourcing creativity in our very wealthy world is the pace of life. If you get caught up in rushing from A to B as fast as people do these days, you will rob yourself of the opportunity to contemplate that internal source. I wouldn’t reframe the system, so much as, slow it down. Our goal of infinite growth is not something we should rush, because if we do it wrong we will run out of resources and then be forced to reduce the system in a way that will hurt even more people.

We are slaves to time and the “race” is on. We lose ourselves in the race even though the finish line is the same for us all. X billion years from now the sun will explode, what’s the hurry?

Imagine if everyone worked one less day a week on income generation and still got paid the same amount. Would we work smarter? Would productivity drop, or would rushed into project failure drop? Would there be more work for everyone? Would there be more time to enjoy life and find the time to source that creative energy? The race is your whipping slave master. Time is your shackle, but no one looked to see that it also has the key to unshackle it right there in its lock.

The slow movement is catching on, but it is not encouraged by the people at the top, because they don’t want the pace of their increasing wealth to be anything but faster. The thing they fail to realize is that the slower and more steady we go the richer everyone would be and that rushing is actually making us all poorer.

In the Power of Myth discussions between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, I recall an “aha” moment that may relate.

Campbell noted that across cultures, people have tried hard to discover and share insights into balancing the calls of internal organs — head, heart, arms, loins etc. They have often done so by externalizing the strengths of their contending (and often conflicting) parts through creation of mythic figures/gods — who can then play out the inner struggles on a more universal stage.

On reading your post and seeing your diagram, my first impulse was to see how universally the roles you’ve mapped out also apply to the workings of our inner realms. I’m not sure that the strengths/roles you’ve mapped thus far in the diagram do indeed possess an “as above, so below” categorical consistency.

I am more confident of a fractal-like narrative pattern in experience. I’ll try to describe it below in the hopes that the strengths/roles you’ve begun to outline can be mapped orthogonally in some way to this narrative structure.

If such a convergence is possible, it could unlock a lot of possibilities for teamwork and collective intelligence to flourish in social networks.

In brief, I believe six elements can be found wherever we look carefully into what goes into (scale-insensitive) narratives of interaction.

These elements are:

attention->tension->opportunity->strategy->test->resolution

As far as I can tell, this pattern can be used to tag activities in both social and physical realms, regardless the scale of the entities involved.

In social interactions with others, for example, the fractal pattern can be used to describe what we opt to focus on as we quickly scan a natural or social environment. It can be used in tagging memorable conversations, in analyzing the assembly of conversations and events that make up subplots, in parsing the assembly of subplots that make up a story, in deconstructing the assembly of stories that comprise an epic, and categorizing what goes into the combination of epics that create an overarching belief system or a religion.

In scientific engagements with our environment, the narrative fractal can be described as:

In science, the assembly of small hypothesis and experiments on these lines similarly scales to grand theories and to revolutions in scientific paradigms.

Such a scale-independent, deep process of experience could also have been at work in the evolution of organelles into single cells, cells into multicellular organisms, and multicellular organisms into complex beings. And it may help explain the emergence of self-awareness (and consciousness of others) in living beings.

Collections of molecules on a small scale that prove able to sense and care about themselves — including an ability to sense and care about patterns of response in dealing with their surroundings — would gain a net survival and reproductive advantage over other assemblages that lack this capability.

Being wired to process interactions on the basis of a fractal pattern of experience, in turn, makes a second leap much easier — an ability to recognize an basically similar neural/information processing model in others.

Indulge me in one more stretch — a look at how a scale-insensitive pattern relating to reproductive success may also help explain our urge to co-create “sentient” social entities at a higher level of intelligence and organization than we as individuals manage.

Building on the insights — as I understand them — of sociobiology, evolution is the story of “selfish” genes, memes, and qualities of spirit (“lumines”) that interact in consilience.

Evolution has generated all kinds of living vessels for their propagation, with generative recipes/scripts regarding how to balance the survival and success of the individual with that of the (emergent) larger good.

Each particle, molecule, organelle, cell, organ, person, community, and civilization has a narrative regarding survival and reproductive success — including sacrifices for the reproductive success of a larger good — that may well hew to the fractal-like narrative storyline outlined above.

As more complex assemblies encounter challenges and react by forming higher-level visions/opportunities, in line with the narrative structure, new strategies for propagation of the entity’s “code” (valued memes and lumines) will be generated, and new acceptance tests (internal and external) will be required.

In whatever forms this evolution may take, we may see intelligent participants — human, artificial, or hybrid– projecting a deep fractal-like narrative pattern into their environment, and continuing to evolve.

If the universe is wired in a benevolent way, consilient memes and lumines propagated through the interactions of these intelligent forms will lead to non-zero sum outcomes for all of our descendents.

I don’t know whether any of the above will be useful in mapping strengths and opening ways for socnets to more readily form teams, but I hope so. Challenges aplenty await in our environment.

1) Activity patterns
An interview guide is an accordion-like structure (sensitive to the interviewee’s time) that is designed to get subject matter experts regardless of domain to share their insights online.
Recently, I’ve also become intrigued by another metapattern – a “narrative fractal” of check-plan-do cycles that organize as a six-part universal storyline. It may offer a way to map individual or group experience (more here http://j.mp/bPGbMj ):

In whatever forms this evolution may take, we may see intelligent participants — human, artificial, or hybrid– projecting a deep fractal-like narrative pattern into their environment, and continuing to evolve.

***Summary: We need to think of subject/matter & object/(tive) matter in the same way we purport to derive intelligence intelligently & collectives collectively. Without this in mind participants/participation and other wished for paradigms are moot or mere artifice. Our objective is not to project a fractal pattern into an environment and let it hatch. Our objective is to generate and share and When necessary) hack a serviceable fractal.***

If the universe is wired in a benevolent way, consilient memes and lumines propagated through the interactions of these intelligent forms will lead to non-zero sum outcomes for all of our descendents.

***If we are benevolent, (who knows?) the evolution of these forms (fractal or not) may indeed manifest as a sustainable generative process.***

in both fictional and actual settings. In brief, the fractal includes –

If this fractal pattern, or something similar, does underpin individual/group learning and engagement, it may provide a workflow for mapping socnet conversations and ensuing actions. It could also lead to creation of user profiles that map to trans-project strengths, skills and relationships for one or more of the fractal elements.

***Our reasoning will not suffer from the occasional “If” – “Then” etc, transcriptions. I intend this to mean, “We can not merely hope or expect that things may or may not occur.”
This having been said, we can say *all six* nodes have individual and distributive subjects and objects that must be demonstrated to harmonise with or adequately reproduce across the fractal or construct in time and space. This is the true object of vision and does not differ from a radical consciousness of the fact that each One is Another’s One. This applies to individuals & each of the so-called “Cycles” Numbered Above.

“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…” Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968).

Now I’ll have to read your post & the comments again to see what else I can understand.

One of the implicit challenges in this discussion is that too often people don’t understand their core strengths, having been “coached” by employers who are motivated by their own needs and career counselors who speak to a perception of “marketability”.

I highly recommend StrengthFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. When you buy the book you get access to an online personality test that reveals your top five strengths. It is uncanny in its effectiveness.

I now ask that anyone who works on a Titanium team take the test before starting. By placing all team strengths face up everyone can see what core competencies we are using, what we are missing, and if we have overlap. It is simple and profoundly powerful.

I wholeheartedly agree that going forward we need to learn to play to our individual strengths. This simple tool allows us to understand what they are. You can buy the book (just $12) and, in turn, take the test from Amazon: http://bit.ly/ddPCRO

i have the book, it was the inspiration for this post. [btw, my 5 are: Intellection, Learner, Ideation, Input, Adaptability – yup, makes sense to me!]

this is exactly what i’m getting at, that we don’t have to see ourselves necessarily as competing over scarce resources. if tact knowledge is a resource, and tacit knowledge is limitless, we can be comfortable in developing those competencies without feeling it’s always about outdoing each other. as someone who has strong ideation/input/learning tendencies, i NEED people with focus/discipline tendencies to team with so i don’t always follow interesting (yet distracting) tangents. if anything, i think the “future of competition” is going to be in being able to identify our strengths & match them with others so that we can solve problems together. it’s very liberating to me.

also, i mention it above in a word cloud, but i’ve been thinking about this since posting, and part of what i’m thinking is that we’re almost going back to tribal tendencies, or a “second orality,” we we create shared meaning through myth, metaphor, and storytelling. i can’t figure out exactly how that fits with the strengths idea, but i know it does somehow, i just can’t see it yet. maybe we’ll describe our competencies in some archetypal way, or somehow via our relationships and social networks. i’m so frustrated because i feel like i’m circling it but i’m not sure how to talk about it.

i was actually thinking of you and wondering how you & your colleagues think this could fit into organizational learning

I think there are a number of paragraphs in the post that track closely with some of Harold’s and others’ writings over the past “x” years about work design or the importance of informal social learning or “the message is the meaning we consume and create together” or “a dynamic two-way flow … ” or visualisation of one’s skills, strengths and connections within a larger eknow-system as a key step in the mass customization of (connected knowledge) work .. etc.

This is a good synthesis in the context of making it clear that each individual is potentially a strong node in an effective network whereby self-knowledge and identification of that self-knowledge to the network is an essential component of the effectiveness of the overall network

I like the clustering and labeling of skills and attributes. Such “clustering” has been a key objective in areas of search and knowledge management for quite a few years, and this use is a tidy and high-utility-value instance of that general quest. You gonna build an algorithm to make it easy and accessible to many ?

well, what i was thinking is that this would be some kind of folksonomy, like delicious tags. i don’t think you can assign a list of words for people to choose from, but it has to evolve into a shared language of sorts.

for instance, i’m starting to see some very interesting job descriptions emerge; in the past few months i’ve seen:

ok, so the point is, we’re getting a lot more creative with the way we describe what we do and who we are. i like that. i think we’re going tribal. (see my comments to mitch above) i don’t see this as being a quantitative measurement, but something more human and holistic. i can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but something that becomes almost mythic, and like a learning game, where we create narratives to better unfold ourselves. in a sense, it’s Art. by using images and stories to understand ourselves, we get closer to our Essence, which i think it essential for us to more forward at a higher conscious level.

Being an effective node in the network is much more than fitting in to some structure. As you have said, Vennessa, social capital is more than just reputation. Knowledge is more than just accumulated information and wisdom is more than just accumulated knowledge.

That’s why I am a proponent of personal knowledge management. It’s about taking control of our learning while simultaneously making it transparent in the network. The PKM processes and tools are only part of it. What emerges from years of PKM are better thought patterns, more critical thinking and access to more and better information for further sense-making. The acts of creating, filing & discussing (all in a public forum) encourage reflection.

I think of PKM as each person’s responsibility to foster social learning as a group/organization/society. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s a mechanism that may enable us to shift from hierarchies (jobs) to wirearchies (strengths).

I’m a Cultural Anthropologist also working in these areas and am happy to have been referred to your piece.

Some brief thoughts:

Civilizations are products of ‘social energy’

Social energy has a specific meaning but can be expressed simply as a whole lot of people doing a lot of different things mixed in with decisions. Actually lots and lots of decisions both as individuals and as members of various groups.

Everything from the decision a nation makes to build a monument (governance), to decisions about it’s design and construction (aesthetics, technology)… all the way to two laborers giving each other a glance and by that glance deciding which one will give right-of-way before going up a ladder, or how much care they put into the job they’re doing (bio-social norms and the strength of the decision-makers link to the social contract). And all those pieces are needed… and ALL those pieces are social energy.

It comes down to people running around doing stuff with stuff, leveraged by technology and guided by an incredibly complex matrix of decisions. In operational terms a decision is an idea + an action.

But social energy is very different from other kinds of energy.

Because agreement is implicit in the energy itself! There can be no social energy at all without some underlying agreement whether that agreement arises by force, necessity or mutual benefit.

Current problems of the sort you refer to, I believe, have a very long history and the search for solutions is missing some important elements.

And technology plays a critical role in not only magnifying this old problem to critical proportions, but must play a role in remedy… in multiple ways.

Re your statement (with which I agree):
“I’m becoming convinced that this is the purpose of the web: to use it as a tool to enhance both ourselves and the network.”

The truth of this is inherent in the recognition that the Internet is actually a new LANDSCAPE… and fundamentally a new Commons upon which both individual and group rights must be balanced… as well as, and perhaps especially with reciprocal obligations and responsibilities required by the new global social contract for this fundamentally new environment for human and social evolution.

I’d like to suggest that some brief relevant posts for fruitful exploration…

These ideas arose out of the investigation of issues in addressing reciprocal obligations in scaled social networks and the interplay with biological altruism, Dunbar’s number (a hypothetical natural human community size), proximity and, especially… issues in technologies of interaction that come with that scale and complexity.

T0day, the corporation exists as a mechanism to make human knowledge tangible through organization of knowledge assets for the production of cars, buildings, bridges, Ipads, etc. But now we all understand that the Wall Street system is not sustainable.

The challenge now is to somehow have knowledge become tangible outside the construct of the corporation and, ideally, inside social media. That’s going to be really tricky. However, we do know that in order to build anything meaningful there needs to be an inventory of parts.

How those parts get put together is best left to the entrepreneur to discover later rather than hypothesizing today. An entrepreneur does nothing more than elevate assets from a low level of productivity to a higher level of productivity by managing risk. If we build our knowledge inventory correctly by representing knowledge assets in a form that the “New Social Entrepreneur” can work with, they will know what to do next.

Knowledge assets need to be catalogued in very fine granularity; this will increase the probability that supply can be matched with demand. This will increase the likelihood that an exchange can form, therefore a representative currency will arise.

But I’m not cynical about the idea of getting to understand ourselves better. We’re all comfortable with meta-Cognition, so why not meta-Attention, meta-Resilience, Meta-Luck? (These are my ‘Big Four’ in terms of learnable skills for the 21st Century)

We’re much more comfortable thinking about expertise as something applied to the ‘external’ (usually a domain) and in terms of it being a positional good. So it seems plain contrary to imagine a world where everybody is an expert at being lucky, for example.

But I think it’s possible.

You say the web has a purpose and we should ” use it as a tool to enhance both ourselves and the network.” I think you’re wrong – because there is no purpose. I also think being wrong is the way things move forward. The half-baked idea that requires those extra few cognitive cycles to disagree or contradict is the source of engagement and conversation.

In that spirit, here’s my purpose for the web: it’s a cubist quest-space. It’s a place where you can look at life from as many dimensions as you like (I’m not talking about viewpoints here – as David Gelernter says, we’ve not evolved that far beyond the savannah – but personas. On the internet I can be a dog.) and you can play meta-games and go on ‘quests’. As you say, we can ‘create narratives to better unfold ourselves’.

That’s my framework for a Strengths-Based Society – a series of RPG meta-games organised around a series of dynamic value-systems. And that’s how I think we should start organising work – as Jon says, we need to build the algorithms that will make this accessible to many.

Just be aware that VNA and even the “science” of Knowledge Management are compromised by their acting within the construct of a corporation. This does not make them invalid, but the challenge now is to make knowledge tangible outside the construct of the corporation and, ideally, stand alone in social media.

Social media does in fact duplicate many functions of the corporation…the question is when will it duplicate enough of these functions so that the traditional corporation is not necessarily required to execute business objectives, specifically those reflecting social priorities, etc.

That’s a great Idea – I’d love to see that too. There is a strong contingency, however, that maintains that knowledge is and always will be intangible. That is, something mysterious that can only be reflected in the context of percentage valuation of the enterprise. Also keep in mind that network behavior inside a corporation reflects people’s interactions as a function of their relationship to the corporation, not necessarily each other. People will throw each other under the bus if their own job depended on it.

What if everyone became an independent corporation? Would they collectively represent a tangible asset or an intangible asset? Is the S&P 500 Intangible? Again, the idea that knowledge assets can be modeled as tangible assets is philosophically incompatible with some otherwise excellent concepts. I’ve been tarred and feathered trying to make this case in the wrong circles.

i’m not suggesting they should be modeled as tangible assets… more like suggestive indicators? think about the people with whom you’ve worked, the ones who excel – what are they like? they could be passionate or they could be driven, but beyond that. do each excel for exactly the same reasons? or do they have “knacks”? one person might be really excellent at communicating a message and inspiring, one might be able to stay focused over the course of a project and see it through to the end without losing momentum, one might be great at empowering and maximizing the strengths of others, one might have a strong sense of foresight and the ability to identify risks and alternative solutions…… i don’t know that anyone embodies all these things, but everyone embodies something. what if these strengths became more apparent, and we were able to self-organize with the aid of these indicators?

another example. i’m following around 900 people on twitter. i have everyone on a list, according to their interest area. with a click, i can find the educators, the kmers, the game designers, the programmers, the researchers, the marketers, the journalists, and so on. let’s say i wanted to bring people together around an idea or project. i don’t have enough information, i need more context. what are the particular strengths you have in relation to your field? at what stage of a process would you be most effective? i don’t know, and maybe neither do you, because you’ve never looked at your strengths in those terms.

and again, i’m toggling between 2 different groups of people. on the one hand i’m talking about “people” in this general sense, because i think ‘out there’ in the world, there are still many many many people who are doing unsatisfying work and are working in their corporate mechanical jobs, and maybe not even thinking or imagining another way. (when i talk about the stuff i talk about on this blog “out there in the real world,” they look at me like i’m crazy. i was talking to someone the other day, and she interrupted me and said – “wait, wait, back up…. What’s social media?” clearly we live in different worlds. these ideas won’t penetrate them (yet). but then there’s you and everyone else with whom i communicate online. this feels very natural and second nature to us, but in the grand scheme, we are very much on the bleeding edge of learning how to use and leverage these tools. we are *defining* it. this is who i’m talking to right now. the knowledge workers, the artists, the makers. (i think this what we ALL are inside, but many people ‘out there’ are still operating with a veil).

we are the ones who have the ability to SHOW how this shiny new thing called the web can be used to *do something* that helps us to help ourselves. we’re already starting to do it.

You are absolutely correct. I am not convinced that there is a huge difference between high performers and low performers, rather, there are lots of misallocated assets. There should be no economic reason or incentive for a person to do what they don’t like or that which they do not have a “knack”. Yet
Schools train us to be conformists (seth Godin has some great comments on this) – product of the industrial revolution.

Your comment about the veil is profound. Indeed, knowledge assets exist – they are simply invisible.

that’s just what i have in mind. i just don’t know how to set it up so that it’s qualitative, yet incredibly useful. i think that’s been the problem = we’ve only focused on how to extract value from quantitative information, but that’s not the only way. when knowledge or strengths or competencies are the capital, measurement gets fuzzy. we just have to think about it in a new way.

No issue with the life rhythm of reflection and engagement, of pulling aside, personally or even in the life of a community as a whole, to look more deeply and consciously into one’s own strengths and changes over time. Spiritual retreats, pilgrimages, and of course, sabbaticals 😉 are all critical for refreshing individuals and society as a whole. And just as important is the ability to align intention with perceived strengths and social needs using all the knowledge and wisdom available.
So in the service of cultivating a framework for a strengths-based society, to what extent should we expect to be able to search out and primarily work with people with whom we could anticipate a certain level of compatibility, shared interests, or complementary strengths? What kind of structure and how much structure should we hope for?
Here’s a Devil’s Advocate thought experiment (which, alas, is probably already more true than any of us knows): why not just turn over corporate HR and recruitment, for example, to an eHarmony.com-type platform? Even given that all the “right” questions and identifiers would and could be applied. What is gained, and what lost, when we rigorously and to the extent possible, exclusively self-select the constituents of our communities based on whatever palette of perceived strengths we are able to name at any given time?
Now, of course, that is the gift and curse of our age. We are more able than ever before to create hard- and soft-gated communities; why would anyone choose to work with or interact with someone they cannot stand and who doesn’t appear to possess any particularly useful strengths for the current endeavor? Because for some folks, you gotta work pretty hard to make the case, right? I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t even know all the reasons I don’t like working with certain people and would never, if at all possible, put myself into position to have to do so. So far, pretty natural inclinations that could easily and with varying levels of consciousness sneak into a framework for a strengths-based society.
Except that sometimes–and I don’t know to what extent you can plan or anticipate it–in the heat of battle, in the crisis of the moment, some of those “outcasts” turn out to be exactly who you needed, and you had no idea (sometimes they had no idea) of what they were capable of doing, given the chance. Whenever I get around to documenting my experience in community development, this would be the heart of the narrative. “We had no idea…” Where in the world did that SOB come from, and thank God he/she showed up when they did.
I’m increasingly drawn to musical/artistic metaphors over military, sports, or commercial/marketing ones. Wouldn’t it be fascinating (probably already done somewhere) to map out historical social structures by the dominant forms of music or artistic expression of the time? I suppose you’d have to account for the forking of expression between the volk music and the concert hall at some point. But I bet the social parallels would be present.
What kind and how much structure do we need to be the social artists of this time (in contrast with the “social engineers” of other generations)? I could imagine in retrospect identifying a core cloud of tags (and you’ve got a terrific start). I just suspect that the development of the language on the ground will be pretty much how languages develop, whether its the language of a sub-culture, the language of music, the language of dance, or the language of community building. More than a little rough around the edges around a coarse, visceral center that bursts and cackles with evocative and provocative expression.
And if it works right, we’ll be continually thrown in with folks we would never have imagined being in community with–in our wildest dreams or nightmares.

you know, ken, this comment made me think of something else. so what i’m proposing is an online tool that would help serve as a bridge for self-discovery and for action. you make a point about ‘ why would you interact with people you can’t stand’….. i think the web actually takes this out of the equation to a degree.

in a previous post i started to explore the role of personal identity, and how the web is shaping it. i said that i think we do ourselves a disservice to put too much emphasis on constructing our online personas (like facebook profiles), because we trap ourselves when we limit our self-descriptions to these kind of shallow, ego-driven displays. i think we are much more than a profile, we have a depth of strengths that we haven’t had a chance to reveal online yet in a meaningful way. i think the ego is the thing that repulses us from each other – the fabricated persona that we all create/maintain in our self-presentation (whether consciously or not), but beneath every crappy personality is a set of inherent strengths that have either been suppressed or simply not recognized. what if we started to engage with each other from THAT level – forget the superficial part. i think this is something that the web actually enables. for instance, you don’t *know* me, and i don’t know you. you know some of my thoughts and ideas, i know some of yours, we are engaging mind to mind. maybe we’d hate each other in real life. (lol, i doubt it, but i’m just making a point). maybe our superficial personalities wouldn’t mix, maybe i’d come across distant or arrogant or selfish or aloof, who knows. maybe our personas wouldn’t blend, but when you strip away the egos, don’t we find that we’re all human, and that we share a common thread?

this is also where i see the web as POSSIBLY helping us to “be more fully human” – if we can engage with each other at this level, and recognize each other’s strengths and humanity, the ego-self will change. it’s asking a lot, but hasn’t the cause of much conflict in the world been due in part to misunderstanding? yes, it’s been about greed and competition and domination and all those other primal instincts too that were useful for survival 10,000 years ago. but we don’t need to fight to survive anymore, we’ve supposedly evolved beyond that. the fact that people are still hungry or lacking basic needs on the planet is obviously criminal – there’s no actual technological reason it should be that way. but that’s another issue. beyond that has been misunderstanding, due to lack of a shared language (‘language’ being both the spoken words, and also the semiotics behind them); we’re at the front end of developing a common language that could bridge us. and maybe the language is not the tag cloud i have above as a visual aid, maybe its imagery or something we didn’t think of yet. but if our purpose is in Being and Becoming, i think it’s possible to create a language that will positively support us in that process.

.. and some of us (me, for one) would argue that much of our North American and western European society / culture is pretty well corporatized.

Hopefully, some of the uses and activities engendered by the use of the infrastructure and tools the Web affords us to de-corporatize.

Let’s look for a brief moment at the maxim “knowledge is power”. That underpins all the assumptions about organized structure in the industrial era, in developed societies. But arguably today it’s who controls information who has the power. Hierarchies (look at the dictionary definitions) are about the “top” having access to and controlling all the key sources of information and knowledge.

Wirearchies ( and please know that I do not seek to over-proselytize re: the term) have a working definition as “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results … “. There are some good reasons why the Web’s impacts past, present and future have been very often likened to the arrival of the printing press, and the subsequent societal changes experienced over the ensuing 400+ years.

OI take it for read that the major impacts of the web are still in front of us, yet to be uncovered and put to (hopefully positive and constructive) use. But the dark side is definitely visible, too.

First of all thanks to you, Venessa, and all other commentators to this post.

It was a quite breathtaking read for me. I am a bit overwhelmed by the topics and by the relevance these topics have. Relevance for ourselves, our societies, us human beings in and out the internet. I will not be able to precisely address all issues I find important here.

What is striking for me though are the parallels between your statments and the challenges I see for issues around career development/self-development and talent development, also organizational learning as was pointed in the discussion above.

From the perspective of organizational and leadership consulting I see many factors that have a potential influence on people, at least in Western countries (sorry for this generalization) to pursue their lives more mindfully, selectively, orienting themselves not only to job careers and monetary aspects. Meaning, social relevance and belonging may count more in the future than they may have in the past.
The options the internet, and particularly the experience of growing up with the internet – I am thinking of Ken talking about his son – offer for those priviledged enough to have learned to trust themselves and love themselves are empowering and maybe emancipatory. This
may add a whole other dimension to how people see their employers, their colleagues, their bosses, etc.
The internet does change perspectives, indeed.
The internet deserves to be taken seriously. But so also do the barriers for those who cannot participate.

those who cannot participate will be at a disadvantage. but we’re also at risk. i haven’t had the opportunity to post about it yet, but the issue of Net Neutrality is very real and very pertinent to our future. i tweeted this link yesterday – Net neutrality laws lie in FCC hands, and i really should take the time to write about this. if we lose our rights to this medium, this form of communication, perhaps the greatest potential gain in human history will be lost.

One useful thing about the net and the way people “do” it: it rapidly reproduces ourselves and our representations. And you are right to say, “Hey, wait a minute! Instead of just filling in our data, pressing ‘play’ and expecting to see something new or different, maybe we should examine ourselves.” This could lead back to the marketeers, who evaluate our data and find us a spouse or a client. Or it could lead us to living examined lives.

I see it every day, young and old people asking “What’s the point of knowing myself when the world wants the data crunched faster and faster? What’s the point of self mastery when i have to demonstrate mastery over sets of other information?

The problem is our society, our culture, our civilisation no longer values us anymore. You are nearing the end of the line of inquiry common to sincere and bright minds thru the ages. During these recent months, i notice you twittered a quote from another sincere person who asked many of your recent questions. It’s probably time to decide whether Krishnamurti’s philosophy of self, society and education is practical or just nice words .

when i started the blog, it was with the premise in mind that we could use this medium in service of ourselves, for Being and Becoming, with intention and purpose. (hence the title). you are correct, i’ve been unfolding this idea over the months, and the end of the rope is near. if we choose not to use it to enhance us, then it’s just another distraction, and i’ll gracefully cash in my chips.

Ack! Just when i’m getting my mind around your stated intention and purpose, (i remember now) your desire for “mindshare,” please do no such thing! Do not “cash in your chips .” I can also, with a little added effort, see your intention, purpose and effort as a sort of wager. I think some of the best thinkers occasionally use this modality.

Not to inject religion here but a friend once pointed out to me the very fair interpretation: “And Elohim ‘wagered’ [or even] ‘boasted.’ And there was light.”

It is up to us individually to use the to web serve an intended collective purpose. This is our latest opportunity. We can cash in our chips like so many marketeers getting out of the bubble before it bursts. But collectively we can not honestly expect to hide from our wagers. Nor can we turn back and repair the things that have been broken. Collectively we need to engineer a sustainable sphere for our existence here on this sphere. *Then* we will be mature enough for the stars.

The discussion is on the edge of formulating a “new system” of knowledge networks categorized into meaningful databases which identify relevant knowledge and frames said knowledge into context.

If we look at you past post and the subsequent exchanges we see conversational threads exchanging knowledge. Now the challenge is how can we inventory, frame and apply the collective knowledge into a organized system? VNA is one perspective and there are numerous others. How do we converge the perspective (knowledge) into a single system that creates new value and meaning? The conversational threads are meaningful put go nowhere without a definitive plan of action and a “system” to enable actions.

The irony of all this dialog is that most of us use existing “knowledge assets” (that which we’ve learned, experience and create) to try and frame the emergence of innovation. Innovation typically is something, including knowledge, that previously did not exist. So maybe we need to “link” old knowledge to create new knowledge that can converge and create new assets. Imagine linking our collective “knowledge assets” and aiming the process at innovation that creates a new economy. Said conversation and relevant knowledge emerging needs to be organized in a better system than what we are using today. To build a system we need cooperation, agreement, definition and a collaborative roadmap that lays track to required innovation.

A convergence of knowledge assets maybe? The irony of all this dialog is that most of us use existing “knowledge assets” (that which we’ve learned, experience and create) to try and frame the emergence of innovation. Innovation typically is something, including knowledge, that previously did not exist. So maybe we need to “link” old knowledge to create new knowledge that can converge and create new assets. Imagine linking our collective “knowledge assets” and aiming the process at innovation that creates a new economy. Could we do it? Maybe but we’d have to get ourselves out of the way 🙂

I’m wondering if “assets” is even the wrong word here .. stills smacks of trying to satisfy people and mindsets that seek order and control over effectiveness ?

“Assets” when held in peoples’ minds, hearts, relationships, motivations and energy can go “poof” when they have a change of heart, or are spoken harshly too or treated unfairly, etc.

I’m wondering about how to help people focus on being proud of who they are and what they do ///not narcissistically proud, but solidly proud, because of (like Venessa’s notion, their strengths, their integrity, their character, their sense of being a part of things worthwhile being a part of).

For example, as a smart young person, why would I invest my knowledge and personal and social assets in working for Goldman Sachs now and into the future unless i was interested in money and personal gain ? Who cares if GS starts some philanthropic initiative aimed at healing baby goats in Namibia … increasingly people see that as a cynical PR exercise I might or would care if GS were actively trying to make the economies in which they operate a more humanist and sustainable “operating platform” aimed at improving peoples’ lives everywhere (yes, I know that there’s a school of thought that says current financial engineering practices aim at growing economies, but the evidence is shaky, no ?

It remains interesting to ,e that many bright and energetic people go into career paths young that take them into GS etc. or big consulting firms, or law, etc. and then when they acquire enough real-world context and experience, they chuck that path and turn to seeking places where they can make a difference, investing their skills, purpose and energy into an NGO or a cause or some initiative significantly more aligned with their core values as they understand them.

I’m not sure, but I think I don’t like thinking of myself as a bundle or configuration of ‘assets’. I understand the push towards trying to understand the territory, though. I think I prefer ‘strengths’ to ‘assets’ as a term.

totally agree. i just double-checked, and i accidentally used the word “asset” once in the post…. i just switched it to “the source of our wealth”, so that it’s clear i am not suggesting we quantify what makes us human.

there have been some really great comments hear that have helped me further understand what i’m thinking, and i’m looking forward to weaving it into an upcoming post.

In the same way that emotion-charged assets can go “poof”, so can strengths – if they are narrowly defined as skills/expertise, purpose, and ability to make a difference for personal or shared causes.

Sudden advances in technologies can undo our investments in such strengths.

At a deeper level, qualities of spirit (virtues or “lumines”) such as resilience, integrity and courage can endure and reproduce, even as more visible assets and strengths come and go.

I’d love to see the archetypes of the higher-level roles/strengths charted by Venessa and others mapped somehow to the qualities in this deeper level.

My hunch is that the higher level roles/strengths in some way emerge from the interaction of these deep qualities with an underlying, fractal-like narrative pattern in experience, as outlined in earlier comments here.

@KevinDoyleJones, are there there any Peircean ontologies/taxonomies of virtues, or diagramming tools, that would be useful?

I’d also be intrigued if anyone has ideas to share on Christopher Alexander’s work on pattern languages.

Perhaps the underlying rules and generative scripts that Alexander has found in ‘alive and whole’ design will help in mapping the higher level roles/strengths, and the deeper qualities of spirit?

I’ve been working with one related project based on Alexander’s Pattern Language: Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/).
However, you really have to follow along with Alexander in his subsequent explorations on the Nature of Order to really dig more deeply into the possibilities.
The paper I’ve most appreciated on this is Alexander’s “New Concepts on Complexity Theory Arising from Studies in Architecture” (http://www.katarxis3.com/SCIENTIFIC%20INTRODUCTION.pdf).
After observing that people were still creating ugly buildings even using the Pattern Language, Alexander tried to dig deeper into the underlying components of wholeness preserving properties and transformations, coming up with 15.
A good summary can be found here (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2001_Winter/ai_81790169/?tag=content;col1).
The four volumes of The Nature of Order are so crazy priced that relatively few folks have really gotten into them much, but I feel they are core to genuinely understanding The Pattern Language and the Timeless Way of Building.

Thanks – I do have the Nature of Order books and have been also deeply impressed. An Oxford Press editor, I believe, called them the most important work Oxford had helped bring into the world in the past 500 years. Will Wright, creator of the Sims games, also credits Alexander for distinctive insights that made the games so successful.

It would be wonderful if the 15 universal qualities of alive and whole design that Alexander found in his cultural surveys could be arrayed on one axis of a matrix, with the other axis consisting of the strengths/roles that Venessa has identified. That way, the distinctive set of contributions from each archetypal strength to Alexander’s attributes could be clearer.

In Russia, a system called TRIZ was developed with huge success to help design and develop products in the physical realm. Perhaps a TRIZ-like system incorporating Alexander’s insights, and Venessa’s strengths/roles, could help teams form, build, and interact within “alive and whole” virtual environments, as well as actual places?

@Mark: I can’t dispute the possible utility of “mapping the higher level roles/strengths, and the deeper qualities of spirit.” After all, I still have a mild fondness for Plato’s republic and a modest appreciation for what may have been Socratic Methods.

I am beginning to appreciate the current fascinations for the fractal metaphor as well. I see it as a rather simple expression of a dialectic involving ontology recapitulating phylogeny. Once we establish an appropriate and respectful ontological discourse for the human project, the varieties of human experience, desires and abilities will show forth in phylogenies specific to circumstances of past and present human history.

At these points we have to step outside our data crunching selves and make value judgments. Sincere logic suggests we need occasionally step outside of the fractal and the analyses thereof to make observations and take measurements that will no doubt interrogate our value system, etc.

Once upon a time, these were going to be tools for the evolution and maintenance of a “more perfect union” among other things.

It is time to be careful as we tread, as Vanessa has pointed out: general conditions and personal ropes are (for this round) becoming terminal. No one collective has to get it all right to make this round worthwhile. What is necessary now is merely a healthy realism combined with an equally healthy attitude of commitment to change. Without these, chances for individual or collective utility are diminished. Actors in the personal and political spheres will only be as effective as they accept these facts and are willing to commit.

It is time to express intention and purpose with the explicit resolve to act.

I love the following (from Wikipedia) on Michael Oakeshott’s insights regarding this —

>>Oakeshott suggested that there had been two major schools of political thought. In the first, which he called ‘enterprise’ association, the state was understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects in which they were forced to participate. ‘Civil’ association however was primarily a legal relationship, in which laws imposed obligatory conditions of action but did not require choosing one action rather than another.

>>In his posthumously published, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, Oakeshott describes the ‘enterprise’ and the ‘civil’ association in different terms. An ‘enterprise’ association is seen as based in a fundamental faith in the ability of the human to ascertain and grasp some universal “good” (i.e. the Politics of Faith), and the ‘civil’ association is seen as based in a fundamental scepticism about the human ability to either ascertain or achieve this universal “good” (i.e. the Politics of Scepticism).

>>Oakeshott saw power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because a) it allowed people to believe that they could achieve something great (e.g. something universally good), and b) it allowed them to implement the policies necessary to achieve this goal. The Politics of Skepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening rather than enabling ambiguously good events.

>>Oakeshott used the analogy of the adverb to describe the kind of restraint law involves. For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing ‘murderously’. Or, a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I have to drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasted with the rules of enterprise association in which those actions required by the directing purpose were made compulsory for all.

A quick thought on modesty in terms of Oakeshott’s framework.

It seems to me that an unwavering commitment to (adverbial) rules of civil association is needed for the metasystem in which self-organizing “enterprise associations” operate.

Within the boundaries of each enterprise association, participants can choose choose what level of humility or (over)confidence they would like to see in their culture. In their interactions with others, they are no more — or less — than formal equals in a playing field in which to (peacefully) try to advance their aims.

The tricky thing is going to be adapting and/or salvaging what is valuable & desirable in the old and broken agreements & structures. Once we start succeeding, once we have created just one beautiful example, it will be easier. People will lead and leaders will no doubt release their pretensions to control and get in front of them – “for i am their leader.”

Until we produce this model, and it won’t be some computer generated neuro community, the forces that control the old agreements will never let go or change. I’ll leave it up to others to determine if they can be trusted.

Let us say the economy of love (charity, philanthropy) operates on voluntary associations and networks held loosely. Still,90% of funds raised for a nonprofit come from the top 10% of the funders. So even the economy of love is focused on cultivating those who have most. Fundraisers are taught, “Do not question capitalism, as this will offrend your best funders.” The gifted need either gifts or jobs. In “tag cloud” strenghts might include having money, positional power, influence, vision, leadership. Somehow we need to create a matrix in which high capacity people find the resources needed to co-create lasting value, including traditions, habits of mind, virtues, and community. The web seemed promising once. Still is, but now we are all a bit sadder and wiser about the clutter, distractions, commericialism and narcissism.

Vanessa,
insightful and so true. The Zoo metaphor assists us to cope with the changes amongst this disruption by helping us to understand different behaviours are more appropriate in different contexts. That is we need to adapt to survive, those who consciously plan their behaviour and align with their desired outcomes will not only survive, but thrive.
Arthur
Tweeting as Metaphorage

Venessa, thanks for all your great thinking and especially for walking your thoughts! I have been thinking along similar lines — and venturing / advising ventures in the online collaboration space since mid-90’s. Don’t have time at the moment to do more than enthusiastically cheer you & this discussion on — but look forward to participating more fully soon.

I absolutely love your ideas! I am especially interested in how your ideas relate to family structure and the future of education. I’ve been informally studying family structure, parenting trends, and educational philosophies for years.
It’s been obvious to me for quite some time that our current model of hierarchy based family structure, power based parenting, and factory line education are not going to work well for the evolving collaborative network society.
I would love to discuss these ideas further with anyone interested 🙂mandidiston@gmail.com
@whatcausesthat on twitter

Vanessa,
This has created a wonderful exchange of thoughts and ideas about who we are and who we could be. I believe humans have now come to a point where they are technically cometent enough to deliberately change their evolution. Our communications via the Internet show this in action, as is medical research. We can now keep people alive longer, enable infertile people to have offspring, the deaf to hear and the blind to see. Soon we will be using these same technologies to enhance those with “normal” vision and hearing to have enhanced capabilities beyond the normal range (hear in other frequencies and nightvision for example).

Such capabilities will change how people interact with each other and what we consider strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps the genetically enhanced individual will be physically more capable, but are we emotionall ready for such “developments”? The world has become so complex already that living earlier generations can struggle to cope. Those who growup with new concepts and technology find the normal, but the ones in adulthood can struggle with them.

This is why our experiences are so important and ourbeavioural strengths so critical. Darwin stated “it is not the strongest or the most intelligent that survives, but the ones most adaptable to change”. I wrote about 20 capability themes that enable people to not only adapt, but have the capability to lead others through these changes. These “strengths” ign fairly wellwith the sentiments in your dialogue here. Thanks for stimulating such a provocative conversation.
Arthur @Metaphorage

I definitely agree with you here and I’d add that there is a natural dilution problem that all of this “information” has produced. As the volume of information available increases, and the tools to create more of it more quickly proliferate, it becomes easier to generate vast quantities of useless and even toxic data — which, when combined with positive social cues (wealth, prestige etc…) can proliferate through our networks.

I don’t believe we as a society are setup to deal with toxic information. Throughout history, while we have had Big Lies they have been mostly limited to geography and definitely limited in volume. Our information networks now open us up to hundreds if not thousands of pieces of anti-information daily and without the right filters, we can actually find ourselves in quite the opposite of the informational utopia that some of the evangelists want to pre-suppose. I think if you look at how quickly gossip, rumor, false facts, and “gray” information spreads through our networks you can see the problem pretty quickly.

That makes it even more important to start thinking in the terms that you are. I don’t have an answer to what the unit of exchange would be that protects us against toxic information but we need to start thinking in terms of systems that augment are rather poor ability to recognize when we’re being sold a bill of goods.

A link to a critical review of Sherry Turkle’s work where she discovers that simulations enable game players to move fluidly between realities, changing their perception of RL (Real Life) and of their permanent sense of self. http://www.transparencynow.com/turkle.htm

This to me is parallel with my own experience of meditative practices which give direct understanding of reality as the mirrored external existence of internal mind states. (Thoughts, beliefs, emotions.)-‘Mind is causal’ (Willis Harman).

I dont agree with the reviewer that it naturally follows that this new perspective of reality and self leads to an apathy of political activism. I see that one of the ‘meanings’ in engaging with the net is definitely consciousness shift and that as blindly as it feels (thank the gods for serendipity) I agree with much of what is discussed on your blog that we are meeting ourselves (each other) in a new way. The interplay of personal and collective unconscious (I dont know where the separation is if at all?) And that this can serve to motivate political social will.

The net is analogous to an inter-dimensional construct of our mirror mind. Eventually it appears we will directly connect with machines through thought and therefore with each other too. I think it’s likely to be healthy for people to observe themselves as players within the illusion of alternate realities. I dont know but I wonder if it encourages awareness of the ‘watcher’ or the ‘witness’? I have yet to engage deeply in them myself. But I’d like to do it in that spirit.

Likewise it is healthy to question how we interact with phenomena. I liked what you said Vanessa about reactivity. I can vouch for that. A product in part of our ‘follow obediently’ education?

I always remember that story about the dreamer dreaming a dream of the dreamer dreaming the dream…was it from India? Both mind and matter are illusory phenomena according to Nondualist traditions.

Theoretical physicists are finding the idea that we might be living inter-dimensionally as plausible if only in mathematical modelling…

I probably fall in the mid to lower right of your visualization but was surprised the ability to sacrifice was not shown more clearly as strength. My sacrifices are mainly consumer products that distract from societal and individual boredom. Without the distractions, I focus on choices that create a fulfilling life: “In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.” (Richard Bach)

VenessaMiemis @tinadybvik what is it that you sacrifice?

The art of sacrifice @VenessaMiemis can you define what you mean by “give up?”

VenessaMiemis @tinadybvik can you define what you mean by “give up”?

I’m what I give up (sacrifice) @VenessaMiemis …re: http://bit.ly/9PfuWP about how we define ourselves…who are you? #limitdemand